Axelrod the New Rove?

Extreme Mortman discusses an analysis from Ad Age by Pete Snyder:

The Obama camp recognized that something very different was going on here. It threw out many of the old political adages and assumptions, including the granddaddy of them all, Americans don’t tune into elections until after Labor Day. Obama’s campaign geared its online and off-line engagement and advertising to build on this unprecedented early interest and mobilized it into an effective ground game to get out their vote.

In short, someone noticed that the world has changed. Read the whole thing.

A Little Soul-Searching

The nation has voted. Barak Obama is our president. I'm still working through just how I feel about that, but the bottom line is what I told my children:

No president ever lives up to his supporters' hopes or his opponents' fears.

Or, to borrow from a Beatle, "Presidency is what happens while you're busy making other plans".

As I recall, George Bush was on his way toward being an entirely different president when 9/11 forced him to take on a new focus. I suspect that the realities will force Obama to become something other than what he had in mind.

So as of this moment, I'm going to do my best to push the "clear" button on the last two years. President-elect Obama has a clean slate in my book. I will do my best to judge him based on what he actually does, not what his opponents say he will do.

When he does something I agree with I'll be honest enough to give him credit. When he does something I disagree with I'll be the "loyal opposition". I will, as Stephen Den Beste puts it, "not give in to the kind of paranoid fever dreams that have consumed the left for the last 8 years." We need to show the more rabid elements of the Left how to elevate political discourse. Or teach them, as my mother always said, you catch more flies with honey than vinegar.

I'm almost looking forward to what is to come. It's been a long time since we got to watch a new administration set up shop. Last time I wasn't fully engaged in the political process like I've become since then. I didn't become a father until a few weeks after Bush took office. I'll be paying closer attention this time around. It will be interesting to see how Obama goes about it during the next two months.

Election Day

It seems appropriate to start a new blog about politics on election day, before we know who will win. Whether it's appropriate to start a political blog at all is open to debate. I dislike politics. I dislike both parties. I wish we could have had a totally different slate of candidates. I dislike having had to pay attention all this time.

And yet I can't stay away, either. Somehow that's no longer an option. As a kid I used to avoid conversations with my father about politics. I'd cringe whenever the political conventions or debates were on and he'd start arguing with the TV. How could he get that wound up in something that was so unimportant? We only get a chance to do something about it once a year, right?

Then I grew up. I got a job, bought a house, got married, and started a family. It matters. These clowns will be controlling the environment I will have to live in for the next few years. They will be the ones who decide if my sons must go to war. They can help me get ahead, or they can keep me down.

It matters.

And now I find myself arguing with the television and actively scanning media for more insights into candidate X's positions or how issue Y may affect me. I have become my father. I understand him better now.

Yet as important as politics has become to me, I still consider myself outside of it all. I probably lean conservative, but I call myself a moderate. I will probably find myself running for office some day, so I'll have to connect myself with one party or another some day, but I'll resist that as long as I can.

I'm the president of my homeowners association. Mostly because no one else wanted the job, but also because I care. The condition of the neighborhood I raise my family in matters. If I don't do something, then nothing is what will happen. In our last neighborhood that meant eight-foot plastic pterodactyls hanging from trees, horrific Christmas light displays up--and burning--year round, rental properties with more weeds than lawn, and campers and boats cramping the streets to the point that our two-lane was really a one-lane. I don't want nothing to happen again.

And I will put aside my distaste for the whole process today and go vote after work. Because it matters. I will probably take my older kids with me so they can see how it works. Because I want it to someday matter to them.

I am not optimistic about our future. The nation appears ready to elect a president that I'm afraid hasn't really told us what he really wants to do, but has rather been telling us what he thinks we want to hear. But I have thought about it, and if he wins I will claim him as my president. I will not belittle him and his position like so many have done the last two presidents. Not voting for him does not absolve me of not granting him the basic respect his office deserves.

I have hope for the future. It's a hope that I will have been wrong about him, that ultimately he will prove as intelligent and thoughtful as his supporters claim, and that perhaps we don't see things so differently after all. It's a hope that, if I'm right about him, he won't have an easy time of getting his way.

It's a hope, too, that perhaps the media will return to their original role of comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable instead of trying to get someone elected. Or, even better, just report the news.

It's not a great hope. But there's always tomorrow.